With the development of mobile Internet and the popularity of smart phones, the demand for mobile data traffic is growing fast. The fast-growing data service poses a tough challenge to the transmission capacity of the mobile communication network. According to the predication made by authority organizations, in the future ten years, the mobile data service will be doubled every year, increased one thousand times over ten years. This requires further increasing the network capacity of the operators to meet the market development request.
Statistics show that most of the mobile data service mainly occurs in indoor and hotspot environments, representing nomadic/local wireless access scenarios. According to the statistics, nearly 70% of the mobile data services occur indoors, and this ratio will also continue to grow. It is expected that it will exceed 80% over the next year. The data service is mainly Internet service, so the requirement for the quality of service is single, and far below the requirement of traditional telecommunication service for the quality of service.
The cellular mobile communication system is mainly designed for traditional mobile and seamlessly switching telecommunication service, which has low spectrum efficiency and high cost when bearing large flow rate and low speed Internet Protocol (IP) packet service.
By taking the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization organizations as an example, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) series standards (R8, R9, R10, R11, where R represents version) regulated thereby have attracted attention of many operators. One common feature of these versions is to give full considerations to the backward compatibility, so that the terminal of low level standard version (for example the terminal implemented based on LTE R8 standard version) can obtain services from the system of high level standard version (for example, the system based on LTE R11 standard version) to fully protect the interests of the users. It can be seen that the current LTE series standards are large and comprehensive technical specifications without providing special enhancement with respect to nomadic and indoor wireless access.
In order to adapt to the market development trend, the cellular mobile communication field requires a solution which is low cost and suitable for nomadic/local wireless data access. The main technical measures include spreading spectrum resources, improving spectrum efficiency, increasing cell density or the like. If the backward compatibility is overemphasized in a new solution of nomadic/local wireless data access as before, on the one hand, the terminal also has to implement the LTE series standards, which increases the implementation complexity of the terminal, and on the other hand, the base station need to work in a way which is compatible with the access of a terminal of low level standard version regardless of whether there is a low level terminal under the base station, which causes inflexible standard version mode of the base station. In addition, given that the heterogeneous network (for example, the network constituted by a macro base station, a micro base station, a Picocell, a femtocell, and a relay station) is important means for meeting the future capacity requirements, if the standard version mode of different types of base stations cannot be adjusted flexibly in the wireless network, the feeling and experience of the wireless network user will be affected.
No effective solution has been proposed for the problem that the system spectrum efficiency is hard to improve effectively and the networking flexibility is low due to the excessive emphasis on backward compatibility in the relevant technology.